"Someone, in Another Time, Will Remember Us": The Poetic Subversions of Sappho

"Someone, in Another Time, Will Remember Us": The Poetic Subversions of Sappho Lyrics

A little over a decade ago, I arrived at college. I was crazy about poetry, in the way that many teenage girls are crazy about poetry. My sentiments toward poetry were similar to the sentiments Horace expresses toward the sea god Poseidon in his "Ode to Pyrrha": I felt that poetry had, in a very personal and somewhat obscure way, saved my sanity, saved my life. To me, poetry was a sort of magnanimous taciturn Greek god who had ripped me out of the teeth of a hurricane and carried me to safety, and my natural duty was to be henceforth devoted to its practice. I considered myself a kind of devotee, charged with reading and writing and proselytizing about poetry.

Looking back, I was also woefully illiterate. Sure, I had done well in my high-school English classes, and I had read a slew of classic novels for pleasure during my childhood and teen years. But what did I really know in those days about poetry, the field that I claimed to be devoted to? The sparse morsels I had gathered from Louis Untermeyer's Treasury of Favorite Poems, bought from the "Bargain Books" section of my local suburban Barnes and Noble store. Scraps of Pablo Neruda's work, which had been recommended to me by a free-spirited boyfriend. Bits and pieces of Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire, scavenged from paperback anthologies. Contemporary poetry was a cipher to me. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome was a mystery to me.

The freshman-year roommate that my university had assigned to me was named Sara. "Oh, do you love poetry? I love poetry, too!" she effused. I noticed that she spoke the word "love" without hesitation or shyness: she was a gregarious girl of Italian ethnicity who overflowed with personality. Having been raised by a Vietnamese-American family in Minnesota who valued modesty and propriety above all, I rarely used such personal words as "love" in my natural speech: it would have felt like standing in front of a crowd and bleeding all over them.

"Yes, I love poetry, too," I replied cautiously.

Sara proudly pointed to a handmade sign that she had posted on her bedroom door. In magic marker, she had copied out a quote from a poem: "Someone, in another time, will remember us. Sappho."

I read the quote, politely, at Sara's direction. Then I read it again. It seemed cocky and overly bold to me, the timid girl from Minnesota who was afraid to use the word "love" in front of strangers. Who was this unfamiliar poetess Sappho who dared to speak out so confidently, like a prophetess, like the mouthpiece of a god?

"You've never read Sappho before?" Sara cried incredulously. She stood up from the couch, darted into her bedroom, and re-emerged a few moments later, carrying a slim paperback book. "Here, you must read this. You'll love it. I'm obsessed with it."

Flipping the glossy paperback open, I discovered Mary Barnard's lovely free-verse translations of 6th-century-B.C. Greek poet Sappho. They introduced me to a voice so naked and essential that it now seems strange to me that I had never encountered it before. They taught me that one's personal longings are not to be hidden under the bed like dirty underwear, but have a kind of god-sanctioned dignity all their own.

Sappho's words have a deceptive simplicity. They seem innocuous, but, on further thought, are actually rigged with explosive blasphemies. In the quote hanging on Sara's door, Sappho dared assert that her poetic vocation gave her the ability to see the future, and that she foresaw herself achieving poetic immortality. In a darker poem that could be interpreted as the "evil twin" of this one, Sappho "prophesies" that an enemy of hers is destined to be forgotten after death:

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

These poems were intended to be performed out loud, in public, a fact that makes their lack of reticence all the more striking. We, the audience, have the uneasy feeling that we are eavesdropping on one of Sappho's most private moments when we listen to her pray aloud to the goddess Aphrodite, addressing the deity with breathtaking directness and sacrilegiously imagining the words that the deity will say to her in reply:

"Who, Sappho, is
unfair to you? For, let her
run, she will soon run after;

if she won't accept gifts, she
will one day give them; and if
she won't love you, she soon will..."

That oracular voice again! That brave willingness to speak in the future tense, to guess at things to come! Reading Mary Barnard's translations of Sappho's poetry, I learned that a poet can be much more than a mere recorder of past events and emotions, that a poet can create fictive worlds out of nothingness, constructing mental projections that reach insidious tendrils into the minds and hearts of her listeners.

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Jenna Le is a poet. Her poetry has been published in such outlets as AGNI Online, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Post Road, and 32 Poems, as well as featured on Poetry Genius. Her first book, Six Rivers (New York Quarterly Books, 2011), was a Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller and is available on Amazon.

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